Neil Bhay - Evolving from smaller to larger engineering teams

Highlights of my conversation with Neil:

• Stakeholder’s level of technical sophistication impacts the level of planning
• Importance of the relationship with the product team
• Envisioning the team's growth past the current state
• Incubating a team until they are able to stand on their own
• Avoiding being too tactical
• Finding opportunities to piggyback new features into the existing work
• Helping new team members buy into the vision by providing the history behind the team/company
• Documentation will help the onboarding process
• Avoiding the walled garden when implementing a squad structure
• Combining project management and release management
• Every squad has 3 owners to drive quality (product, engineering, release)

Meet: Neil Bhay is the CTO of TuneCore, a global platform for independent musicians.  He joined TuneCore in 2018 with the mission to scale and introduce enterprise-level best practices to TuneCore’s organizational structure & technology stack. He evolved an original team of 6 & established agile processes to oversee remote/local teams of 65+ in IT, QA, Release Mgmt, DevOps & Engineering in operations of office, cloud infrastructure & web/native app development.

Neil comes from a history of managing enterprise technology teams at Viacom and HBO and, before that applying those same skills in start-up environments which contributed to his expertise in growing and organizing teams towards product delivery.

If you have any questions for Neil, please feel free to reach out via:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/neilbhay/

I hope you enjoyed the episode. The best place to connect with me is on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirbormand (Amir Bormand). Please send me a message if you want me to cover specific topics with future guests.